New Gun Control Laws

Here are some new gun control laws that I think would be helpful.

Biometric Bedside Safe

• If a gun owner does not keep there guns secure, and they are used in a crime, the gun owner should be legally considered an accessory to the crime by the law.
• Doctors who become aware that patients with mental illnesses that could lead to violent behavior have access to someone else's guns should be legally allowed to contact those gun owners to recommend they either remove the guns or make sure they are properly secured from the patient's access.
• Annual physicals should be accompanied by annual "mentals". Maybe a basic mental test/questionnaire where if the something was off, the Doctor could refer you to a mental health professional for further evaluation the same as they would refer you to a urologist, or gastroenterologist if something in the physical exam seemed wrong.
• Gun sellers should have to keep a proper inventory of weapons and weapon sales that can be review on a regular basis.

Here are some general ideas that I think would help.

Anyone who owns a gun and is either storing or transporting it, should make sure the gun is disabled by more then just the safety being on. This can be achieved by removing bolts, slides and wheels from the gun and storing them separately. There are also cable locks that pass though the magazine receiver and out the ejection port. Trigger locks are also available. The biggest problem with locks is they don't disable the gun, they just make it so you have to get the key or break the lock. Disabling a gun, especially if the removed part is kept locked up separately, reduces the chances of the gun being used by another person. 

In the case of guns being used for personal security, when possible, owners should wear the guns. If you can't, like while sleeping, then a bio-metric safe/storage box can be used. These can work better then ones that use codes/combinations/keys as they are quick to open, but don't have something other people in the house can get a hold of.

Access to competent mental health professionals should be made at least as easy and cheep as buying a gun, legal or illegal.

Here are my thoughts about arguments for/against gun control

High capacity magazines have been a popular target lately. From what I have read, all the arguments to keep high capacity magazines around boil down to compensating for people not trained in combat shooting. IOW they can't do one shot one kill. Sometimes not even 6 shots one kill. The main argument for banning them is it creates more openings (reloading) for intervention. I think that there are plenty of high magazine clips out there and banning new ones will make little difference. I also think that 3d printers which are already getting close to making usable semi-automatic and automatic guns, So they could certainly be used to create high capacity clips. Once the cost of 3d printers drops, and the materials they can work with improve, laws banning or restricting access to any type of gun hardware will be useless. So it's a moot point.

I think the argument that we need to be able to keep guns in order to defend against an oppressive government is ridiculous. Most people think that during the revolutionary war it was ordinary people fighting trained British troops, but that was usually not the case. George Washington was a British General with a long career before he sided with the colonists. He made sure that the militias were well trained. However the vast majority of weapons owned in the US are by people who have no combat training. Shooting targets, or stopping someone breaking into your house is completely different then using weapons during war. Not to mention, even the best assault rifles would be useless against modern military technology.

As for protecting others, most cases where someone used a gun to stop a shooting spree, the someone had previous military or police training, not ordinary people. In cases where ordinary people try stopping something with a gun, more people actually get hurt.

As for hunting, its no longer needed for survival. It's a sport at best, but more likely just an amusement. If it was still needed for survival, the NRA would be handing out rifles and ammo to all the homeless people so they could fend for themselves.

The constitution exists to limit government and protect people's rights. Rights are not defined by the constitution, they are defined by the people and protected by the constitution both in general, and explicitly stated where needed (The Bill of Rights, a subset of rights, not a list). Laws exist to sort out conflicts when one person exercising there rights, infringe upon another person exercising their rights. A gun is not a person, it is an inanimate object, and thus can not infringe on another person's rights, a person with harmful intent is required. So in and of itself, neither the law nor the constitution should ban, restrict, or allow the availability of guns. The laws should however define the limits of what people can do with guns to reduce or prevent the violation of people's rights.

Gun Regulation/Prohibition

Some people belief that people are inherently good, and they only do bad things when the temptation is at hand. Thus if you eliminate the temptation everyone returns to being good. This was the idea that led to the prohibition of alcohol. The only reason most people supported it though was because they assumed it didn't mean the alcohol that they used. 

Prohibition doesn't work because it’s dependent on the concept that humans are inherently good and seek to do good things. However like all animals, humanity is inherently neutral and motivated by short term advantage. Prohibition of alcohol didn't work, prohibition against drugs hasn't worked, the war on drugs has never been anything but a failure, and why we think a prohibition against guns will work is ridiculous. Morality though legislation never works. And in the end, that’s what we are trying to do, “remove the guns and people will be good”.

"Prohibition goes beyond the bounds of reason in that it attempts to control a man’s appetite by legislation and makes crimes out of things that are not crimes."~Abraham Lincoln

In order for law that restricts or bans something, in other words remove what is already there, it takes the entire population acting as enforcement to work. Whereas creating something like a national healthcare system can be accomplished by an organization with the funding and acceptance of the American people. Since the vast majority of people who support gun control are not willing to provide enforcement of those laws themselves, it’s like the prohibition on alcohol. Once the supporters got the laws passed, they left it up to a government that had absolutely nowhere near the resources to properly enforce the laws. With the prohibition on drugs, it’s the same thing; the government has nowhere near the resources to enforce the law to any effective degree. 

From what I have seen, the only thing that works in eliminating a widespread problem is widespread education. It was the primary force that led and still leads the fight against racism and sexism. Both have seen far more progress than has ever been seen with prohibition.

Why aren't wars reported honestly?

The public needs to know the truth about wars. So why have journalists colluded with governments to hoodwink us?

In the US Army manual on counterinsurgency, the American commander General David Petraeus describes Afghanistan as a "war of perception . . . conducted continuously using the news media". What really matters is not so much the day-to-day battles against the Taliban as the way the adventure is sold in America where "the media directly influence the attitude of key audiences". Reading this, I was reminded of the Venezuelan general who led a coup against the democratic government in 2002. "We had a secret weapon," he boasted. "We had the media, especially TV. You got to have the media."

Never has so much official energy been expended in ensuring journalists collude with the makers of rapacious wars which, say the media-friendly generals, are now "perpetual". In echoing the west's more verbose warlords, such as the waterboarding former US vice-president Dick Cheney, who predicated "50 years of war", they plan a state of permanent conflict wholly dependent on keeping at bay an enemy whose name they dare not speak: the public.

At Chicksands in Bedfordshire, the Ministry of Defence's psychological warfare (Psyops) establishment, media trainers devote themselves to the task, immersed in a jargon world of "information dominance", "asymmetric threats" and "cyberthreats". They share premises with those who teach the interrogation methods that have led to a public inquiry into British military torture in Iraq. Disinformation and the barbarity of colonial war have much in common.

Of course, only the jargon is new. In the opening sequence of my film, The War You Don't See, there is reference to a pre-WikiLeaks private conversation in December 1917 between David Lloyd George, Britain's prime minister during much of the first world war, and CP Scott, editor of the Manchester Guardian. "If people really knew the truth," the prime minister said, "the war would be stopped tomorrow. But of course they don't know, and can't know."

In the wake of this "war to end all wars", Edward Bernays, a confidante of President Woodrow Wilson, coined the term "public relations" as a euphemism for propaganda "which was given a bad name in the war". In his book, Propaganda (1928), Bernays described PR as "an invisible government which is the true ruling power in our country" thanks to "the intelligent manipulation of the masses". This was achieved by "false realities" and their adoption by the media. (One of Bernays's early successes was persuading women to smoke in public. By associating smoking with women's liberation, he achieved headlines that lauded cigarettes as "torches of freedom".)

I began to understand this as a young reporter during the American war in Vietnam. During my first assignment, I saw the results of the bombing of two villages and the use of Napalm B, which continues to burn beneath the skin; many of the victims were children; trees were festooned with body parts. The lament that "these unavoidable tragedies happen in wars" did not explain why virtually the entire population of South Vietnam was at grave risk from the forces of their declared "ally", the United States. PR terms like "pacification" and "collateral damage" became our currency. Almost no reporter used the word "invasion". "Involvement" and later "quagmire" became staples of a news vocabulary that recognised the killing of civilians merely as tragic mistakes and seldom questioned the good intentions of the invaders.

On the walls of the Saigon bureaus of major American news organisations were often displayed horrific photographs that were never published and rarely sent because it was said they were would "sensationalise" the war by upsetting readers and viewers and therefore were not "objective". The My Lai massacre in 1968 was not reported from Vietnam, even though a number of reporters knew about it (and other atrocities like it), but by a freelance in the US, Seymour Hersh. The cover of Newsweek magazine called it an "American tragedy", implying that the invaders were the victims: a purging theme enthusiastically taken up by Hollywood in movies such as The Deer Hunter and Platoon. The war was flawed and tragic, but the cause was essentially noble. Moreover, it was "lost" thanks to the irresponsibility of a hostile, uncensored media.

Although the opposite of the truth, such false realties became the "lessons" learned by the makers of present-day wars and by much of the media. Following Vietnam, "embedding" journalists became central to war policy on both sides of the Atlantic. With honourable exceptions, this succeeded, especially in the US. In March 2003, some 700 embedded reporters and camera crews accompanied the invading American forces in Iraq. Watch their excited reports, and it is the liberation of Europe all over again. The Iraqi people are distant, fleeting bit players; John Wayne had risen again.

The apogee was the victorious entry into Baghdad, and the TV pictures of crowds cheering the felling of a statue of Saddam Hussein. Behind this façade, an American Psyops team successfully manipulated what an ignored US army report describes as a "media circus [with] almost as many reporters as Iraqis". Rageh Omaar, who was there for the BBC, reported on the main evening news: "People have come out welcoming [the Americans], holding up V-signs. This is an image taking place across the whole of the Iraqi capital." In fact, across most of Iraq, largely unreported, the bloody conquest and destruction of a whole society was well under way.

In The War You Don't See, Omaar speaks with admirable frankness. "I didn't really do my job properly," he says. "I'd hold my hand up and say that one didn't press the most uncomfortable buttons hard enough." He describes how British military propaganda successfully manipulated coverage of the fall of Basra, which BBC News 24 reported as having fallen "17 times". This coverage, he says, was "a giant echo chamber".

The sheer magnitude of Iraqi suffering in the onslaught had little place in the news. Standing outside 10 Downing St, on the night of the invasion, Andrew Marr, then the BBC's political editor, declared, "[Tony Blair] said that they would be able to take Baghdad without a bloodbath and that in the end the Iraqis would be celebrating, and on both of those points he has been proved conclusively right . . ." I asked Marr for an interview, but received no reply. In studies of the television coverage by the University of Wales, Cardiff, and Media Tenor, the BBC's coverage was found to reflect overwhelmingly the government line and that reports of civilian suffering were relegated. Media Tenor places the BBC and America's CBS at the bottom of a league of western broadcasters in the time they allotted to opposition to the invasion. "I am perfectly open to the accusation that we were hoodwinked," said Jeremy Paxman, talking about Iraq's non-existent weapons of mass destruction to a group of students last year. "Clearly we were." As a highly paid professional broadcaster, he omitted to say why he was hoodwinked.

Dan Rather, who was the CBS news anchor for 24 years, was less reticent. "There was a fear in every newsroom in America," he told me, "a fear of losing your job . . . the fear of being stuck with some label, unpatriotic or otherwise." Rather says war has made "stenographers out of us" and that had journalists questioned the deceptions that led to the Iraq war, instead of amplifying them, the invasion would not have happened. This is a view now shared by a number of senior journalists I interviewed in the US.

In Britain, David Rose, whose Observer articles played a major part in falsely linking Saddam Hussein to al-Qaida and 9/11, gave me a courageous interview in which he said, "I can make no excuses . . . What happened [in Iraq] was a crime, a crime on a very large scale . . ."

"Does that make journalists accomplices?" I asked him.

"Yes . . . unwitting perhaps, but yes."

What is the value of journalists speaking like this? The answer is provided by the great reporter James Cameron, whose brave and revealing filmed report, made with Malcolm Aird, of the bombing of civilians in North Vietnam was banned by the BBC. "If we who are meant to find out what the bastards are up to, if we don't report what we find, if we don't speak up," he told me, "who's going to stop the whole bloody business happening again?"

Cameron could not have imagined a modern phenomenon such as WikiLeaks but he would have surely approved. In the current avalanche of official documents, especially those that describe the secret machinations that lead to war – such as the American mania over Iran – the failure of journalism is rarely noted. And perhaps the reason Julian Assange seems to excite such hostility among journalists serving a variety of "lobbies", those whom George Bush's press spokesman once called "complicit enablers", is that WikiLeaks and its truth-telling shames them. Why has the public had to wait for WikiLeaks to find out how great power really operates? As a leaked 2,000-page Ministry of Defence document reveals, the most effective journalists are those who are regarded in places of power not as embedded or clubbable, but as a "threat". This is the threat of real democracy, whose "currency", said Thomas Jefferson, is "free flowing information".

In my film, I asked Assange how WikiLeaks dealt with the draconian secrecy laws for which Britain is famous. "Well," he said, "when we look at the Official Secrets Act labelled documents, we see a statement that it is an offence to retain the information and it is an offence to destroy the information, so the only possible outcome is that we have to publish the information." These are extraordinary times.

www.johnpilger.com

• The War You Don't See is in cinemas and on DVD from 13 December, and is broadcast on ITV on 14 December at 10.35pm

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John Pilger

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Why aren't wars reported honestly?
John Pilger
Fri, 10 Dec 2010 11:42:22 GMT

Quote: Benjamin Franklin

Remember me affectionately to good Dr. Price and to the honest heretic Dr. Priestly. I do not call him honest by way of distinction; for I think all the heretics I have known have been virtuous men. They have the virtue of fortitude or they would not venture to own their heresy; and they cannot afford to be deficient in any of the other virtues, as that would give advantage to their many enemies; and they have not like orthodox sinners, such a number of friends to excuse or justify them. Do not, however mistake me. It is not to my good friend's heresy that I impute his honesty. On the contrary, 'tis his honesty that has brought upon him the character of heretic.

I think that would describe me.

Waterford Apartment Problems

We might have ac at the apartment again after over a month

Odd Fact

The Walt Disney character Donald Duck's middle name is Fauntleroy.

Quote

Like if a tree falls in the woods, it's still a tree ain't it?
~Anon

I just want to lick your mind